On the road again

Tomorrow we leave for Wexford, due south of Dublin. David is spending a week at a Plein Air landscape painting festival--as he did last year. I’m going for half a week to check out Wexford.

Today I arranged with a neighbourhood teenager to take care of our cat. This vastly simplifies the logistics of me picking the cat up from a cattery when I return from Wexford without a car.

So I’ll start with a bit of tomorrow’s craic. We drove through a charming little town called Gorey. While we were there, I’d say nearly 100 trucks drove through the town, horns blaring, lights flashing. WTF? Turns out, it was the 2nd annual Wexford Monster Truck Festival, held to raise funds for the MRI scanner fund for Wexford General Hospital.

The truck run started in Kilrane then went through New Ross, Enniscorthy, Gorey and Wexford town via the coast road. Each trucker pays an entry fee, then the public pay 5 euro each to attend a truck fair. In a time of climate change--when Ireland has suffered three months with no rain, I find this incredibly irresponsible. I also am appalled by the Red Arrows, the British Air Force flying team that tears around doing aerobatics all over the UK (and Ireland, apparently).
Using vast amounts of petrol for the purpose of entertainment, or fundraising, strikes me as a symptom of our collective mental illness. We are entertaining ourselves at the expense of the horrors our children will face.

I realise I must sound like a terrible curmudgeon in this blog. I really don’t go around bah humbugging every day. But when you are woke on climate, it is hard to ignore a parade of 100 trucks driving around County Wexford to raise money for health care when we’d all be healthier if air and water quality weren’t suffering because of fossil fuel use.
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